Mention of investigating the Device Manager got me to thinking, and here is the situation. Back when, I installed and plugged in a scanner to backside connections. That has now gone on to use at another computer. But, back a couple years ago, I hit the UNinstall, and it seemed to have gone away. It was a scanner which creates one of those ON-board PCI connections. As expected, it then does not show up in hardware profiles, or software. This all three years ago. On occasion now, I find a Conflict in Device Manager due to that older PCI rearrangement. The original and older scanner working folder is long gone, and nothing shows up in AUTOEXEC.BAT file, or registry. But on occasion I get that yellow conflict notice in D.Mgr. When I try to Uninstall via Add-Remove in settings, after a few seconds an error message comes up reading cannot find some certain file in any folder. In dealing with a bundled package of scanner software, it must have loaded on some OCR software, created a DLL, and now when comes time to resolve the conflict, this missing element is holding things up. Do I load up the whole of the scanner software once again just so teh DLL will place itself and I can then remove it? or, Do I just learn to live with the occasional conflict? It does not happen all of the time, but every three months or so I see the yellow conflict listing. Wondering as to why occasionally here too. Things work OK right now otherwise. It is NOT on system as of today either, but will be in 2-3 months again. Wm.

Try going into the BIOS screens and enabling a setting called "reset configuration data" for one boot cycle and then disable it if it hasn't done so by itself. That should reallocate all the IRQ assignments.

If it's still showing up in add/remove programs you should probably run a registry cleaner as the registry is where add/remove gets it's information. The only one I've used is something called 'regcleaner'. It's nothing fancy and worked OK with my 98. Others may have better suggestions.

CCleaner runs in Win98 and has a decent registry cleaner that seems to be safe to use.

RegSeeker is Free for Peronal use and the best I'e found. Contact for commercial licensing is on the Download page. Get it from the Link below. http://www.hoverdesk.net/freeware.htm There is nothing to learn from someone who already agrees with you.

Boot into safe mode, then look at Device Manager. Run thru the entire list & if you find any duplicate entries, remove ALL entries for that device. For example, if you click on Display Adapter & find that your video card is listed twice, remove both entries. When you reboot, Windows will reinstall the device.

I have RegCleaner already loaded up and going. Check there about every second day as to if if something new snuck in. Wm.